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Is San Francisco New York?

BoomtownA sightseeing map
of San Francisco’s
New Gilded Age, prepared by our friends and future overlords at
San Francisco Magazine.

Of course, San Francisco won’t truly become New York, and not just because New York’s economy is nearly twice as big as the country’s next biggest (that’s L.A.’s, not San Francisco’s, which ranks eighth). San Francisco is too earnest, too eager to be liked, to truly wallow in its wealth like Bloomberg’s New York. (If Martin Scorsese had made The Wolf of Silicon Valley, it would have been two hours of Leonardo DiCaprio apologizing for spilling the Dom Pérignon.) The utopian streak of the tech sector paints a thick veneer of do-gooderism over even the rawest capitalistic conquests, and coupled with a desire to appease the locals, it’s what keeps San Francisco’s ruling class from really letting go.

My New York friends tend to brush off what’s happening in San Francisco with one word: bubble. After all, people flocked to Silicon Valley in 1999, they say, only to be flung back to New York when the start-up scene burst. But what if this tech bubble doesn’t end in sock puppets and Schadenfreude? What if, as MIT professors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee recently wrote, we’re not just dealing with a temporary tech craze but the dawn of a “second machine age” that will fundamentally realign the entire global economy? And what if most of the technology that powers that revolution is made in California?

Whatever the Silicon Valley gold rush has done or will do, it’s already given us an entirely new species of yuppie mogul: the one who stockpiles bitcoin and speaks in hacker pidgin, the one who wears Uniqlo on a Gulfstream and obsesses over single-origin coffees. The kind, in other words, who plays the underdog even while sitting on top of the world.